Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

Republicans try f*cking and sh*tting their way to the White House

Trump's language is being imitated now by other candidates, including the holier-than-thou Rand Paul.

Senator Rand Paul called any proposed trade-off between safety and liberty nothing but “bull,” before adding a syllable. ...NYT

And...

“Rand totally admires and worships Mr. Trump and copies anything he says,” said Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign manager, in an email....NYT

They're behaving like resentful teenagers, not like grown-up candidates for the presidency.

Lower-polling candidates in the Republican field have gravitated instead toward a Trump-like tactic: Insult rivals, add a dash of profanity, end with a rhetorical question.

“You’ve got the No. 2 guy tried to kill somebody at 14, and the No. 1 guy is high-energy and crazy as hell,” Senator Lindsey Graham said on MSNBC last month, referring to Ben Carson, who has said he tried to stab a friend as a teenager, and Mr. Trump. “How am I losing to these people?”

Even the mellow Mr. Carson has participated, gingerly.

“This is a bunch of crap,” he said at the debate in Boulder, Colo., last month, discussing government regulations.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reveals the deliberately racist drug policy now embraced by Republicans. They're separating heroin users for special consideration because heroin users match the suburban, white demographic of their supporters... as distinct from pot and crack in non-white areas.

More than 40 years after Republican President Richard M. Nixon coined the phrase “war on drugs,” many GOP presidential candidates are calling for an end to one of its central tenets — by agreeing with Democrats to treat low-level drug offenders rather than incarcerate them.

The Republicans are selective, however, about who is deserving of their compassion.

Several GOP presidential contenders have advocated treating the nation’s growing heroin epidemic as a health crisis, not a criminal one. But most stop short of advocating the same approach to other drug laws, notably those involving marijuana and crack cocaine, which disproportionately affect African Americans.

Such views highlight the resonance and reach of the opiate epidemic — but also a persistent racial and geographic divide in American politics. The heroin epidemic has overwhelmingly hit whites. It has also skyrocketed to the top of voters’ lists of political priorities in the same bands of America — rural states, the suburbs and notably the early voting state of New Hampshire — that track directly with where Republicans must perform well to win back the White House next year. ...WaPo

This strategy reminds us of the pre-W Karl Rove data collection that gave the Republicans an edge as much as 15 years ago and has continued to affect elections.

The candidates are walking a narrow but perhaps politically astute line, some say, between making inroads with the ballooning number of suburban and rural voters who have been touched by the country’s exploding heroin crisis — yet not alienating Republican voters who fear that the roiling national debate about race and policing has left law enforcement exposed. ...WaPo